Competitions

Perpetual Alpha is a live algorithmic-trading competition in which teams design, implement, and operate autonomous trading agents on the Hyperliquid testnet. Organizers will deploy dedicated HIP-3 perpetual futures markets covering major crypto assets and European equity underlyings.

Teams compete over multiple weeks under identical starting conditions using non-monetary testnet capital. The final ranking combines realized profit and loss (40%), the strategy's risk profile measured through return volatility (30%), and algorithmic sophistication assessed by an expert jury (30%). Winners will be announced at ICAIF '26, where top teams will present their approaches.

This live portfolio-management benchmark welcomes autonomous trading agents of any design. Participants manage a long-only portfolio across 30 U.S.-listed equities in six sectors, using standardized market and fundamental features and, optionally, public financial news. Agents submit target portfolio weights for execution at the next market open.

Every agent starts with USD 1,000,000 in cash and operates under common constraints: a 30% cap per asset, gross exposure of no more than 100%, and a 0.1% transaction fee on purchases and sales. Participants receive 2020–2024 training data, an environment SDK, baseline agents, and validation on held-out 2025 data before final evaluation on newly released live market data.

Performance is assessed across nine measures covering profitability, risk-adjusted returns, downside risk, and execution quality: cumulative return, daily win rate, Sharpe ratio, Sortino ratio, maximum drawdown, value at risk, expected shortfall, turnover, and violation rate.